In a tight Presidential race, questions are being raised about voter registration and polling station practices that may affect the outcome.

quote:Two advisers to John McCain's presidential campaign today said a flood of questionable voter registration applications in swing states threatens to undermine the accuracy of the November election and could prevent legitimate voters from registering for a ballot.

The warning came less than a week after the Democratic party filed a lawsuit in Michigan seeking to end what its lawyers said were Republican efforts to suppress votes of poor people and African Americans, two historically Democratic constituencies. The move indicates the Democratic and Republican parties are set to battle over voter registration in the remaining weeks of the campaign.

On a conference call with reporters this afternoon, former Republican senators John Danforth and Warren Rudman said a coalition of community organisations called Acorn had in several states submitted voter registration applications for people who were already registered.

The senators did not accuse the group of fraud, but suggested the group's registration drive was "diluting" legitimate votes and causing havoc in the nation's voter registration process.

"Our mission is to ensure that everybody who is entitled to vote gets to vote without any intimidation but also that there's no stuffing of the ballot boxes, no fraudulent voting and also that the rules are the same for everybody," said Danforth, a former Missouri senator.

"We are concerned that there is or may be a pattern of registering people who are not entitled to vote or otherwise gumming up the system for registering voters."

He cited news reports in Michigan, Colorado and elsewhere describing problematic registration applications surfacing after large Acorn registration drives. Earlier this month in Detroit, for example, the secretary of state's office cited a "sizeable number of duplicate and fraudulent applications" arising from an Acorn drive.

Last week, Republican officials called Acorn's North Carolina chapter "a quasi-criminal, Democratic affiliated organisation" after an election official asked the state to check 80 applications submitted by the group.

Republicans and their allies in the corporate media are promoting the myth that hordes of foreigners and felons are waiting for election day, to vote on school board contests, library and park district levies, and of course, presidential elections. Secretive, spurious and malicious purges of the voter rolls are removing millions of legitimate voters from the rolls in the prelude to next month's election, and Republicans are manufacturing criminal cases against those who run voter registration drives.

For their part, Democrats refuse to defend voter registration drives, and take money from the manufacturers of crooked electronic voting machines. Where are Democrats, where is Barack Obama on the issues that affect their voters the most, the question of whether their votes will be counted?

John McCain and other Republicans making criminal allegations against the community-organizing group ACORN know exactly what they're doing. They're using alarmist allegations of "voter fraud" to fire up their conservative base and suppress the votes of some citizens who may, out of fear, stay away from the polls.

They exploit lingering unease among the poor and minorities who, with some justification, believe themselves to suffer disproportionately from unbalanced wheels of justice in America. These innocents know they don't have to commit crimes to be accused of crimes. Better to stay away from the places where the accusations might be leveled. Like the polls.

The allegations can also help cover up actual election fraud undertaken on behalf of McCain. This is the tactic Karl Rove learned so well from his right-wing predecessors: accuse your opponent of your own unethical or illegal acts.

These are a tried and true -- and grossly undemocratic -- tactics. And they are often accomplished with the complicity of the press.

I don't think there is a journalist covering the ACORN matter who doesn't know with a great deal of certainty that there is a substantial difference between fictionalized voter registration forms and real voter suppression and election fraud. The former are easily identified and never result in fraudulent voting. No one covering these stories believes that someone is going to show up at the polls this year and say, "My name is Mickey Mouse."...

The media attention granted the right-wing attacks on ACORN begs the question: why does it seem to be a greater sin to be suspected of voter registration mistakes than to publicly engage in voter suppression efforts?

John McCain's statement in the debate that ACORN and the liberals are "on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history ... maybe destroying the fabric of democracy" is probably the most overwrought, ridiculous statement by a major-party nominee in living memory.

If you make a charge that serious, you better have something to back it up. McCain has nothing. Nada zero zilch.

There is no evidence of any attempt to rig or steal this election. Just think about the scale of the effort it would take to do what McCain describes.

On a statewide level, you would need an army of thousands of co-conspirators willing and able to vote repeatedly and illegally just to have any hope whatsoever of altering the outcome, and according to the GOP fantasy, those thousands consist of homeless drunks and drunk addicts.

Yet out of this alleged conspiracy of thousands in which lowlife drunks and dopers play a large part, the GOP and its allies in the Justice Department and other governnment agencies can't find a single participant willing to admit to the conspiracy and cough up the truth?

To rational people, that would suggest that no such conspiracy exists. But rationality has nothing to do with it.

Now, with the debates over and Obama enjoying a sizeable lead in election polls, the only question remaining is whether we will have a fair election. This would not be a question had suppressing the vote not become a cornerstone of Republican electoral strategy....

Since 2003, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, at least 2.7 million new voters have had their applications to register rejected. "Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law," the [url=http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/us/politics/09voting.html]NY Times reported last week.[/url]

[url=http://www.acorn.org/]ACORN's Web site[/url] notes that "the electorate does not reflect the citizenry of the United States of America. It skews whiter, older, more educated and more affluent than the citizenry as a whole." Bertha Lewis, ACORN's lead organizer, told me: "We organize low- and moderate-income people, usually folks who are minorities - African-Americans, Latinos, Asians and working-class white people. And most of these folks have always been disenfranchised out of the electoral process. ... We've registered 1.3 million new voters across the country over an 18-month period of time. We had over 13,000 hard-working voter-registration workers. And we may have had a few bad apples, but I don't know any organization that didn't."

Barack Obama himself was questioned about ACORN's problematic registrations. He said: "Having run a voter-registration drive, I know how problems arise. This is typically a situation where ACORN probably paid people to get registrations, and these folks, not wanting to actually register people, because that's actually hard work, just went into a phone book or made up names and submitted false registrations to get paid. So there's been fraud perpetrated on probably ACORN, if they paid these individuals and they actually didn't do registrations. But this isn't a situation where there's actually people who are going to try to vote, because these are phony names."

ACORN has seen some clearly fraudulent registrations submitted, with names like "Mickey Mouse" turned in. ACORN says it reviews all the registration forms. However, it does not serve as the ultimate arbiter of which registrations are fraudulent. In fact, ACORN cannot legally throw away any voter-registration cards. It flags suspicious cards and submits them to the appropriate state election authority to make the judgment.

Republicans are increasingly alarmed at the shifting demographics of the United States. Minorities tend to vote Democratic, and the United States is slowly becoming a majority minority country - by 2050, whites will no longer represent a majority in the U.S.

I'm getting really peeved at the demonizing of ACORN that the GOP is doing. ACORN is an incredible organization.

And Obama should have a better response during the debate than simply distancing himself from the organization. A good response in the debate would have been:

"ACORN is a vital organization that gives voice to many working families in America. They are not perpetrating voter fraud. They are trying to register as many people to vote as possible, which is commendable. Unfortunately, some of the canvassers ACORN hired appear to have taken advantage of ACORN and have turned in false voter registrations instead of doing the canvassing they were paid to do. This will not, however result in fraudulent voting, unless you think someone with fake ID that says "Mickey Mouse" on it will be showing up at the polls with a voter registration card. ACORN is a victim of a few unscrupulous people who took advantage of their good intentions."

Hell, CNN was able to get this across with their pundits. Why CNN can defend ACORN in a short, pithy soundbite on national television and Obama can't is beyond me. He should have said what he was quoted to have said in the post just above mine here in this thread.

Powerful elements of the Republican Party and the conservative "movement" aren't just preparing themselves to go into opposition, they're preparing themselves to dispute the legitimacy of an Obama presidency -- in ways that could, if taken to extreme, lead to another Oklahoma City.

This bizarre hysteria against "voter fraud" can be traced directly to the White House and to the McCain campaign. In order to divert attention from voter suppression tactics that helped win Bush the White House in 2000 and 2004, the Bush administration created the myth of "voter fraud." Karl Rove and his political operatives like Mark F. "Thor" Hearne used fake "voting rights" organizations and other obscure groups to finance civil suits and put pressure on the U.S. Department of Justice to bring criminal charges against voter registration organizations. Twelve federal prosecutors were fired by the Bush Administration for refusing to go along with this witch hunt. - [url=http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2008/3249]Source[/url]

Before Mississippi’s March presidential primary, one county election official improperly removed more than 8,000 voters from the eligible-voter rolls, including a Republican Congressional candidate. Fortunately, the secretary of state’s office learned of the purge in time and restored the voters.

It’s disturbing that a single official (who acted after mailings to voters were returned) could come so close to disenfranchising thousands of voters. But voting rolls, which are maintained by local election officials, are one of the weakest links in American democracy and problems are growing.

Some of these problems are no doubt the result of honest mistakes, but in far too many cases they appear to be driven by partisanship. While there are almost no examples in recent memory of serious fraud at the polls, Republicans have been pressing for sweeping voter purges in many states. They have also fought to make it harder to enroll new voters. Voting experts say there could be serious problems at the polls on Nov. 4.